Ghost ships are said to be “sufficiently abundant” in certain locales as “to make them a hazard to navigation” (Beck 1973, 395). Some—seen in storms or fog—are probably mirages. (For example, a fiery, phantom-ship mystery I investigated in Nova Scotia was solved by witnesses who cited fog in front of the moon coming over the horizon, causing it to appear like a ship in flames [Nickell 2012, 172–173].) The phantom ships are almost always purposeful—“usually to serve as a forerunner to warn or prepare those who see it for dire events” (Beck 1973, 395–396).

Such a vessel—known as “Wyoming’s Ship of Death” (Riccio 1991) and “Platte River Ship of Death” (Rizzo 2013)—is described in numerous accounts, the earliest known having been in the premiere issue of Fate magazine in an article by Vincent Gaddis (1948). But was that “phantom ship of the Platte” truly a thrice-documented paranormal phenomenon or instead a work of fiction? Here are the facts.

The Story Told

Haunted Places: The National Directory (Hauck 1996, 462) summarizes the three alleged personal accounts presented by Gaddis, but it makes some errors and important omissions, so here is my own capsule version.

In each tale, a man encounters a spectral ship covered in ice on the Platte River. On deck is a crew of ghostly sailors who, at the command of their captain, lower a sheet of canvas to reveal—before the vessel vanishes—a corpse. In each case, it is that of someone beloved of the witness who subsequently learns that he or she has died that very afternoon. First, in 1862, an Indian scout named Leon Webber saw his dead fiancée. Next, in 1887, cattleman Gene Wilson was shown the “terribly burned” face of a woman he nevertheless recognized as his wife. And finally, on November 20, 1903, homesteader Victor Heibe, who had been a witness for hired-gun Tom Horn at his murder trial in Cheyenne, saw the hanged body of his friend dangling from the cross-arm of a gallows. Heibe had checked his watch, which read 3:15—the time of Horn’s hanging, implies Gaddis (1948, 115, 128), on that very day!

Gaddis claims that these accounts were originally gathered by something called The Cheyenne Bureau of Psychological Research. The first two are quoted in their entirety (they are models of conciseness and colorful imagery) and are indicated as “(signed)” followed by the witness’s name. The last is told in Gaddis’s words except for brief quotes from the alleged witness who, it is indicated, had also made a signed statement. Gaddis (1948, 128) concludes:

Perhaps it should be added that Mr. Heibe did not know that the phantom vessel had appeared twice before until he was asked by the bureau to file his own account of his weird experience.

Three times the phantom ship of the Platte, under sail and coated with glittering ice, has emerged from out of the vasty deep. When will it again appear with its tale of gruesome tragedy?

Research on my behalf by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga failed to turn up either the first or third witness, although Tom Horn was indeed hanged for the ambush-murder of fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell (yes, a distant relative of mine), having apparently been mistaken for his sheepherder father. (This was during the Wyoming “range wars,” when Horn was hired gun for the “cattle barons” [Ball 2014].) The second witness shows up on the 1900 U.S. census for Wyoming as Eugene Wilson, age thirty-five; he was “widowed,” which is consistent with his wife having perished in the “autumn of 1887.” But why did Wilson fail to give his wife’s name or provide her death date as an essential fact?

Textual Evidence

Each of the three tales Gaddis provides is told in storybook fashion with the obvious intent of being spine-tinglingly mysterious, as shown by Webber’s use of “apparition,” “chilling,” “Spectral Ship of Death”; Wilson’s “set my nerves atingle,” “strange vessel,” “overcome with terror”; and Heibe’s (in Gaddis’s retelling) “phantom ship,” “spellbound,” and “scene of horror.” Each tale ends with the ghostly ship vanishing followed by the dramatic revelation that the gruesome vision proved true, having occurred at that very time. However, real people’s first-person accounts do not always end that way. Some finish with puzzlement as to what actually happened or give some philosophical or other response (see St. Aubyn with Hanbury 1996, 24–25, 31). In short, the Gaddis trilogy reads more like a single attempt to sell the supernatural than three separate accounts of actual experiences.

Various words and phrases in the three accounts seem unconvincing as the language of simple outdoorsmen (though not for Gaddis, whose use of the phrase “the vasty deep” shows he knew his Shakespeare [see Henry IV, Part I, act 3, scene 1]). Consider Webber’s “to give vent to,” “assumed the shape of,” “the apparition,” “standing in a circle of close formation,” “covered with hoar-frost which glittered in the rays of the afternoon sun,” and “the Spectral Ship of Death”; Wilson’s “while gazing out upon the swiftly running water,” “the man whom,” “without a sign of animation,” “frost-laden sailcloth,” “what I surmised,” “the frightfully scarred face,” “my supposition is that”; and Heibe’s (as related by Gaddis) “the vapory vessel,” “a scene of horror on the phantom deck,” and so on.

Moreover, the “three” men not only describe the respective scenes similarly, but they often use similar wording. For example, all refer to “a sailing vessel”: “a sailing vessel of an ancient type” (Webber), “a full-rigged sailing vessel” (Wilson), and “the form of an ancient sailing vessel” (Gaddis paraphrasing Heibe). Then there is the piece of sailcloth: “a large square of canvas” (Webber), “a square of canvas” (Wilson), and “a large sheet of canvas” (Gaddis speaking for Heibe). Again, Webber refers to “a strange sight” and “the strange phenomenon,” and Wilson speaks of “this strange vessel,” while Gaddis speaks of Heibe’s “weird experience.”

Another stylistic similarity is found in the use of passive-voice constructions: for example, Webber says that he “was told”; Wilson states that “ship sounds were heard” and the “canvas was lowered”; and Gaddis (paraphrasing Heibe) also says the “canvas was lowered.”

I decided to apply to the three texts a standard “readability formula,” based on the length of independent clauses together with the number of polysyllabic words (Bovée and Thill 1989, 126). The levels for Webber, Wilson, and Gaddis/Heibe were, respectively, 10, 10, and 12—that is, the approximate education level, in years, each text would be placed at. These education labels would seem somewhat high for the Indian scout, cattleman, and homesteader but could be expected if all were written by Gaddis.

Other Revelations

Gaddis’s little trilogy of tales—about the spectral ship emerging from mist and forecasting deaths that occur, distantly, at that very time—is not entirely unique. It obviously evokes Greek mythology’s River Styx, which surrounds the underworld. Across it the aged boatman Charon ferried the souls of the dead. (In Gaddis [1948, 115] a voice tells the hanged man, Horn, “it is our duty to ferry you across”—emphasis added.) The three visions are akin to “dream clairvoyance”—in which a dream or vision of an event allegedly occurs simultaneously with the event (Guiley 1991, 112). For example, in an Edgar Allan Poe tale a mystic tells a man—regarding an out-of-body experience the latter has had—“that at the very period in which you fancied these things amid the hills I was engaged in detailing them upon paper here at home” (Poe [N.d.] 1975).

Quite often, a ghost anecdote is of this kind. A well-known example, told by a Judge Hornby, occurred in 1875. A reporter had showed up unexpectedly one evening and, looking “deadly pale,” insisted on taking advance notes of Hornby’s impending judicial findings. The next day Hornby learned that the man had actually died at the time of the visit and that, although he had never left the house, with his body was the notebook recording the judge’s summary! In fact, the judge’s often-told but too-good-to-be-true story succumbed to investigation, and a bewildered Judge Hornby would later admit, “My vision must have followed the death (some three months) instead of synchronizing with it” (quoted in Hansel 1966, 186–189; see also Nickell 2012, 197).

Gaddis’s trilogy does not hold up well either. For example, the detail, in Victor Heibe’s alleged account, that his vision occurred at 3:15 on the afternoon of November 20, 1903, has only the day correct; Tom Horn was actually hanged at 11:08 a.m. and formally pronounced dead sixteen minutes later (Ball 2014, 421). The ploy of having Heibe glance at his watch—unaccountably, just before the death ship emerged from the fog—provides what fiction writers call verisimilitude (a semblance of truth). Another touch of verisimilitude is the claim that the three accounts were all witnesses’ signed statements collected by the Cheyenne Bureau of Psychological Research.

What is especially problematic is that Gaddis claims that all three accounts—the first, the second, and the third and last-known—came from this single source. But if the Cheyenne Bureau of Psychological Research never existed, then Gaddis is revealed as the creator. A search of books and internet sources (the latter conducted by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga) failed to turn up any evidence that such a bureau ever existed except for sources that (admittedly or otherwise) derive from Gaddis.

Conclusions

Vincent H. Gaddis (1913–1997) is known to have written fictional stories in his early years (Fiction Mags Index N.d.), and “Wyoming’s Ship of Death” is surely one of these. Its publication in the premiere 1948 issue of Fate is itself a clue. That pulp “true mysteries” type magazine did not—especially in its early years—make factual accuracy its most important concern. Ray Palmer, its copublisher (with Curtis Fuller) had previously edited the bestselling science fiction magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures and was hugely involved in the early hyping of flying saucers, about which he once asked rhetorically, “What if I told you it was all a joke?” (Cohen 2001). Jerome Clark (1998, II: 404) a former editor of Fate, acknowledges that “Purely fictitious stories, some written by Palmer under various pseudonyms, appeared in the magazine.” Gaddis’s supernatural death-ship yarn was probably bought by Palmer with a wink and a nod.

That many have taken Gaddis’s “Wyoming Ship of Death” at face value shows the credulity accorded the paranormal, and it casts further doubt on Gaddis’s “nonfiction” works as well. He went on to fame—or infamy—as the one who, according to writer John Keel (2001), “originated” the Bermuda Triangle “mystery” (Gaddis 1964; Gaddis 1965)—largely a contrived one, based on careless research and embellishments (Kusche 1975). He also helped promote belief in flying saucers, spontaneous human combustion, poltergeists, and the like (Gaddis 1967).

It is easy to see why a writer such as Gaddis would forsake fiction for the “unsolved mysteries” genre. He was spared having to constantly make up new stories when there were ghost, flying-saucer, and other such tales readily available. That those were supposedly true rather than fictional took care of the needed verisimilitude, and there was a ready public appetite and corresponding market for such spine-tingling tales. Gaddis, Frank Edwards, and their fellow mystery mongers borrowed from each other, rewriting the accounts as necessary without wasting time investigating their truth or falsehood. Of course, skeptics were frequently debunking the accounts—in whole or part—but avid readers either turned a deaf ear to them or simply moved on to the next batch of yarns. In fact, this process still continues.

References

Ball, Larry D. 2014. Tom Horn in Life and Legend. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Beck, Horace. 1973. Folklore and the Sea. Edison, NJ: Castle Books.

Bingham, Joan, and Dolores Riccio. 1991. More Haunted Houses. New York: Pocket Books.

Bovée, Courtland L., and John V. Thill. 1989. Business Communication Today, 2nd ed. New York: Random House.

Clark, Jerome. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. In two volumes. Detroit: Omnigraphics.

Cohen, Daniel. 2001. Raymond A. Palmer. In Story 2001, 399–400.

Fiction Mags Index. N.d. Available online at http://www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/s/s3235.htm#A73986; list of Gaddis stories, accessed February 20.

Gaddis, Vincent. 1948. Wyoming’s ship of death. Fate, 1(1) (Spring): 112–115, 128.

———. 1964. The deadly Bermuda triangle. Argosy, February.

———. 1965. Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea. New York: Chilton Books.

———. 1967. Mysterious Fires and Lights. New York: Dell Books.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mystical, & Unexplained. New York: Gramercy Books.

Hansel, C.E.M. 1966. ESP: A Scientific Evaluation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Hauck, Dennis. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York, NY: Penguin.

Keel, John. 2001. In Story 2001, 536.

Kusche, Lawrence David. 1975. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved. New York: Harper & Row.

Nickell, Joe. 2012. The Science of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Poe, Edgar Allan. (N.d.) 1975. A tale of the ragged mountains. In The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Random House, 679–687.

Riccio, Dolores. 1991. Wyoming’s ship of death. In Bingham and Riccio 1991, 47–51.

Rizzo, Tom. 2013. Legend of the Platte River Ship of Death. Available online at http://tomrizzo.com/Legend-of-the-platte-river-ship-of-death/; accessed February 12, 2015.

St. Aubyn, Astrid, with Zahra Hanbury, compilers. 1996. Ghostly Encounters: True Tales of the Ghouls, Spooks and Spectres in the Lives of the Famous. London: Robson Books.

Story, Ronald D. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.